Re-polishing the Crown of a cushion Tanzanite

A jeweler brought us this Tanzanite. Their customer wanted it made to look like new again.

After years of wear, this stone was so heavily worn, I could barely see any of the original facets. But I could see just enough of them to know what type of pattern the stone originally had.

The process of re-polishing a faceted gemstone requires finding the angles and indexes for each of the facets. Once the facet is located, I polish each facet just enough to get under the scratches and/or chips.

Below, you will see photos and description of the re-polishing process.

Before re-polishing

As you can see, this Tanzanite is so heavily worn, it looks like a piece of frosted glass. The scratches interfer with how the light travels through the stone and also interfer with the reflections. The scratches give the crown a whiteish look and keep you from seeing its true color.

Re-polishing

Here you can see that I am working on the main facet on the side of the stone.

I will need to find and re-polish all of the facets.

A crown like this has 40 facets plus the table. So re-polishing all of the facets can take a while.

After re-polishing

After the stone has been re-polished, you can see the true color of the stone and the brilliance has returned.

A gem like this may actually look better than when it was first cut. That is because, Tanzanites are almost all cut overseas where they used polishing laps which are not flat and leave facets whith ripples in them which interfer with the brilliance. We use nice flat laps with the highest quality diamond compounds for our polishing process. That gives the best polish.